L. Congdon, Seeing red

László Perecz

pp. 165-167

in: Tamás Demeter (ed), The sociological tradition of Hungarian philosophy, Studies in East European Thought 60, 2008.

Abstract

As the subtitle makes clear, the latest book of Lee Congdon, the well-known scholar of Hungarian intellectual history, characterizes responses by emigrant Hungarian intellectuals to the challenge of communism. The work can also be seen as a thematically narrow addendum to the author’s earlier book (Exile and Social Thought: Hungarian Intellectuals in Germany and Austria, 1919–1933, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). If compared to the previous work, the current book deals not only with the work of those who emigrated to Germany and Austria after the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, it also includes the entire 20th century emigration, its focal point being the emigration to the English-speaking world. Also, this book does not look at the intellectual output of the émigrés in general, but rather it examines specifically the answers given to the challenge of communist ideology, and the theoretical reflections on Soviet practice.

Cited authors

Congdon Lee